Would like help with native shade plant suggestions

Toxi- peruse this-

http://www.omnisterra.com/botany/cp/slides/tc/tc.htm

I tried to send you some files but failed miserably. No photos showing.

Equi, I admire your commitment to native plants- I am trying to get rid of all my non-native invasives (beware free plants from well meaning friends when you're a novice gardener- oh the agony of English Ivy! Too bad because it sure looks pretty) and replace them with natives, especially shrubs with berries for the birds. My garden will never be all native but I want to include as many natives as I can.
Anyway, a great source for native plants is Gardens of the Blue Ridge, I 'll post a link...
I have a lot of natives that were on the property when I came here- one is hay scented fern- and it speads like crazy but it is so beautiful I just let it, it is controllable. If you want something like that to fill an area I would be glad to send you some in spring. ( it can take dry soil well once established.) I have other things you might like too. Lots of bloodroot and some goldenseal, partridge berry, and others. I just used leaf mold to amend the soil and mulch them.

I don't know if Brunnera is native but the new hybrid Jack Frost is a really nice plant for shade. (on my wish list- sorry I have none to share.) I do have some nice chartreuse Lamium, I don't know the cultivar.
:)
Cindy

http://www.gardensoftheblueridge.com/

You know, I just looked back over this thread and I missed an entire post from lmelling complete with a photo! I have a little area on the north side of my house that I have quite a few hostas in. Not nearly as nice as the area photographed with the seating area or the little footpath but I do have a rather interesting birdbath in the area. I planted two new hostas planted there called 'Strip Tease' that are really neat.

Oh dear... I must have given people the wrong impression. Yes, I have chosen to plant natives BUT... I will not pass up a non aggressive plant for a particular location if it won't end up in a neighbor's yard and I will not pass up adding a nice bearded reblooming iris to what I have. And then there are all those nice day lilies and hostas that don't hurt a soul! I get a lot of gifts from my MIL and they are all exotics and I stick them in the ground close to the house where I can watch them. I won't plant anything in the woodlands or wetlands that is not native and I did become a stickler in that area more so because of all the existing damage. This still gives me a lot of opportunity to plant exotics up in tight around my house. There is a woman across the street from me who is now a "born again native plant fiend". She used to remind me of some ugly x-smokers I once knew. She left a note in my mailbox about my Snow All Summer. I had been a bad girl about that. I take for granted that I am actually considerably more flexible than most of the diehard Native Plant Folk. I stuck a note back in her mailbox about her two Burning Bushes. I also couldn't help myself when I stuck another note in her mailbox with information on Buckthorn and was politely pointing out to her that her landscapers had been mulching around the base of and pruning a Big Momma Fruiting Buckthorn almost as if it was a specimen tree. She even had bird feeders hanging from it. Oh baby, that tree was cut down the next week. I guess she showed me! I went out and took care of my snow all summer that day. We have a truce going right now as we actually like each other a lot these days. She refrains from commenting about my iris and I have stopped placing photos of her Bradford Pear in her mailbox. I have no idea what I am going to do when she gets rid of that Bradford Pear as I will have no ammunition left! She's replacing it next spring with a nice big B&B.

Brunnera isn't native but it isn't aggressive! Enjoy it! The Jack Frost is my favorite of all of them. My MIL bought me 3 of them.

:-)

I missed oceangirl's link. I am slipping!

Your link has nice plants. One thing around here is that I need to go for quantity. I need that bulk pricing as I am dealing with an incredible amount of space and my property is beyond degraded. I'm sort of in big trouble. Here are a few of the nurseries I placed orders with for next spring-
Agrecol- www.agrecol.com (they won't deliver unless oreder is over 1k) If you want
something from here, let me know as I can always add to an existing order.
Enders- www.endersgreenhouse.com
Applied Ecological Services, Inc./Taylor Creek Nursery- www.appliedeco.com
Cascade- www.cascadeforestry.com
J.F. New & Associates- www.jfnew.com
Prairie Moon Nursery- www.prairiemoon.com
Great Lakes Nursery- www.greatlakesnursery.com/index_files/page0001.htm
DragonFly Gardens- www.dragonflygardens.net/plantcourses.htm
Prairie Nursery- www.prairienursery.com
Ion Exchange- www.ionxchange.com
Hild & Associates- www.hildnatives.com
Forest Farm- www.forestfarm.com
Oikos Tree Farms- www.oikostreecrops.com

All of these I have ordered from in the past except Dragonfly and Applied Ecological Services which have very good reputations. Normally when I first place an order I select about 3 or 4 different plants. If the quality is good, I go in and place an order for what I need. My plant orders for next spring through early summer are topping a few thousand plants. Don't be thinking gallon containers as the vast majority of what I ordered was affordable plugs, 4' pots, and bareroots and I have help here every once in a while getting it all in the ground. If not, it gets in by fall. What I do know is that I ordered flats of Partridge Berry and Bloodroot. Cindy, If you would like a few plants from my orders to strengthen your gene pool over there, I would be more than happy to share. You and I are both east of the Rockies.

Leaf mulch is what I use also. The DG member Jessamine turned me on to that over a year ago. Now I drive through neighborhoods where people bag it for curbside pick up and ram my car full to the point I can't see out the rear view mirror. I pay particular notice to the houses that have mulching lawn mowers.

Here's what I have to say about all the English Ivy I planted here- %$@#*&

Here's what I have to say about Villages and Home Owners Associations around here that are cropping up all over the place dictating that nobody can plant anything but native plants- %$@#*&

I think the lady slippers might do okay if you prepared finely chopped leaf litter mixed with pine needles and maybe some peat moss. But you have to make sure to have their special fungus.

Are we talking about the orchids or the other kind?

Cypripedium acaule! Pink Lady Slipper. Allegedly it likes full shade. Allegedly it hates acid. One thing I know is that the plant hates me. Naturally, I will buy more next year as I am going to get it right one of these years andit appears I am a glutton for punishment. I did originally try pine needles and mulched oak leaves. It all but spit in my face and fizzled before I even got a chance to fuss over it. Right now I have it in a fen. First time I tried that. I suppose the test will be if it comes back next year. It is in partial shade.

I am not having issues with bog orchids which seem to cause big issues for other people. My Calopogans (Calopogon tuberosus) common name of Grass-pink were doing great until the squirrels nailed them.

Now here's something I'd like to get my hands on- Platanthera blephariglottis.
The White Fringed Orchis. I did a little checking after you mentioned Orchis. Way cool plants.
http://www.osrbg.ca/files/PLA_BLE.HTM

I've always heard of these guys growing under pine trees in evergreen forests. Don't feel bad about it "hating" you. It's supossed to be a VERY hard plant to successfully transplant.

Perhaps if you bought from a company that sends in a pot full of it's native soil, you'd have better results.

This thread is getting really long, LOL.
CaptM, I was talking about cypripedium calceolarus or however it is spelled...Yellow Lady's Slipper orchids...for seed germination. I think it is too complicated for me to try and I might just scatter the seeds in the area and blindly hope that 10 years from now a tiny seedling or two might emerge. One article said if you harvested dry, brown pods (I did) you have to keep them in the frig for 4 months, so that is what I am doing for now, until I have time to learn more about it. Equilibrium sent a great link to a site for home tissue culture (Thanks!) and so I have copied it to Word to peruse at my leisure this winter.
A friend of mine traded me 2 baby (one leaf each) pink lady slippers for one of my big yellow ones. But she does not know if they are acaule or reginae or what. I planted them and then they went dormant. Hope I see them again next year. She got them from a grower in Kentucky.
Oh, and the English Ivy...I have about an acre of it and it is terrifying! It scrambles out into the woods overnight and is increasingly difficult to contain. It is very beautiful in fall, winter, and spring when all else looks bare and dead, though.

Hi Toxi, I got help with getting rid of my English Ivy at this site-
http://www.noivyleague.com/Pages/control_methods.html

These sites are also helpful-
http://www.ivyout.org/
http://www.eces.org/archive/ec/bioinvasion/plants.shtml
http://www.explorenature.org/ecotips.htm

I am relatively sure I am on the way to eliminating all of my ivy. It took well over a year. I still see it trying to come back here and there. Terrifying is an understatement. I really feel sorry for you. I don't see anyway to go at an acre without using chemicals around the perimeter to keep it contained while working on the interior. You have me beat ten fold as to having one of the ultimate nasties to deal with.

Well, actually I would not dream of getting rid of all of it. I love it and planted it purposely. But I never imagined it would do so well and spread so far. I prune the edges in June and September, which is a big chore, but it keeps it somewhat contained. The challenge is to get it off the trees...I let it climb a lot of trees and I have now decided maybe that was not such a great idea (I got a couple of seedlings because the vine had matured on one tree and the birds started eating them). So no more mature vines for me. I think herbicides (applied repeatedly) would be the only way to kill it, it is impossible to dig out once it gets well established. This property of mine has such poor rocky thin soil that the ivy has not displaced anything very valuable so far, but I keep it away from any perennial beds, etc.

One of my favorite native perennials: Foam Flower, Tiarella cordifolia

Clump forming habit; foliage similar to coral bells; beautiful white flowers for several weeks in the spring; foliage dies back in mid to late winter and emerges in late spring the following year

Other attractive natives: Mayapple, Spring Beauty, Bloodroot, Rattlesnake Weed, Orange Hawkweed, Virginia Bluebells, Viper's Bugloss or Blueweed, Mountain Laurel (Shrub), Trailing Arbutus, Spotted Joe-Pye Weed, Queen of the Prairie, Common or Daisy Fleabane, New England Aster, Spotted or Pale Touch-Me-Not, Spiderwort....the list goes on

Native Small Trees: Common Dogwood, Eastern Redbud, White Fringetree

I want a Mt Laurel that is white so bad!

The tiarellas are one of my favorites too.